I discovered Dorothy Sayers during my junior year of college. After class on Friday afternoons, I’d go to the library, browse slowly through the fiction shelves and choose books at random, then curl up in my dorm room with peanut butter crackers and a cup of Earl Grey tea. No comments, please, about the sad lack of a social life.

During one of these expeditions, the faded gold-lettered words “Gaudy Night” on a book spine caught my attention. I had no idea what the title meant, but it sounded interesting. Soon the story of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane among the towers of Oxford was unfolding under my delighted eyes, and I never looked back. Dorothy Sayers has been an enjoyable and thought-provoking companion ever since.

It’s impossible to do justice to Dorothy Sayers in this short article. In brief, she wrote some of the best mystery novels in the English language, most of which featured Lord Peter Wimsey. She wrote plays, essays, advertising copy, and poetry. She translated Dante’s Divine Comedy in the 1950’s; the translation is still in print. I found a copy in Borders Bookstore last week.

Sayers’ writing is marked by wit, learning, and a mind alive and awake. With all this, she is far from being a stuffy, dry intellectual. Her writing is interesting and entertaining, and it rewards the reader.

Since I love detective stories, let’s start with the Lord Peter novels. Lord Peter Wimsey made his appearance in Dorothy Sayers’ debut novel, 1923’s Whose Body?. Lord Peter is witty, musically inclined, a connoisseur of wine and old brandy, collects first editions, and dresses appropriately for any occasion. “‘Can I,’ said Lord Peter, looking at himself in the eighteenth century mirror over the mantelpiece, ‘can I have the heart to fluster the flustered Thipps further – that’s very difficult to say quickly – by appearing in a top-hat and frock-coat? I think not. Ten to one he will overlook my trousers and mistake me for the undertaker. A grey suit, I fancy, neat but not gaudy, suits my other self better. Exit the amateur of first editions; new motive introduced by solo bassoon; enter Sherlock Holmes, disguised as a walking gentleman.’”

Beneath the steady stream of nonsense that flows from his fertile brain, Lord Peter displays a talent for crime solving, much to the dismay of his noble relatives. The Wimsey books also display a depth and breadth that is rare in detective fiction. Lord Peter is no superman – he suffers from shell shock, is prone to vanity, and grapples with the moral dilemmas involved in solving crimes. Even those cases that start out as mere intellectual exercises to him always bring pain to someone in the end, a fact that he struggles with.

Nearly every character in the books is well drawn and developed. Charles Parker, who plays Watson to Wimsey’s Holmes, is an unassuming young man who relaxes his mind by reading Galatians and commentaries on Hebrews. (Yes, yes: Bunter, Wimsey’s “man” also plays Watson to his Holmes, I know). Wimsey’s mother, the Dowager Duchess of Denver, gives James Joyce a run for his money in the stream-of-consciousness department, and with a great deal more wit and interest. One can imagine meeting The Nine Tailors’ Vicar Venables in the street. Wimsey’s sister-in-law, Helen, is summed up succinctly as “a long necked, long backed woman, who disciplined her hair and her children.” And Harriet Vane turns out to be a more complicated character than even her creator first anticipated, as she grapples with the questions of love, scholarship, and honesty in life and her relationship with Lord Peter.

In addition to peopling them with vivid characters, Sayers sprinkles every novel with literary allusions and references that speak to her considerable intellect. She graduated from Somerville College at Oxford, and was one of the first women to receive her MA from Oxford. Her knowledge encompassed first editions of folio Dantes, Latin, French, Lewis Carroll, and a considerable range of alcoholic beverages. Sayers also worked in an advertising agency for a number of years (her Mustard Club campaign is still considered a classic), and Murder Must Advertise displays her knowledge of the inner workings of an ad agency.

Sayers was no stranger to the social and literary world of the 20’s and 30’s, and several of her books describe Wimsey’s brief forays into the bohemian world of intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals. “The Soviet Club, being founded to accommodate free thinking rather than high living, had that curious amateur air which pervades all worldly institutions planned by unworldly people. Exactly why it made Lord Peter think of mission teas he could not say, unless it was that all the members looked as though they cherished a purpose in life, and that the staff seemed rather sketchily trained and in evidence … Wimsey looked with new respect at the lady in the Russian blouse. Few books were capable of calling up a blush to his cheek, but he remembered that one of Miss Heath-Warburton’s had done it. The authoress was just saying impressively to her companion: ‘- ever know a sincere emotion to express itself in a subordinate clause?’ ‘Joyce has freed us from the superstition of syntax,’ agreed the curly man. ‘Scenes which make emotional history,’ said Miss Heath-Warburton, ‘should ideally be expressed in a series of animal squeals.’ ‘The D.H. Lawrence formula,’ said the other. ‘Or even Dada,’ said the authoress. ‘We need a new notation,’ said the curly-haired man, putting both elbows on the table and knocking Wimsey’s bread to the floor. ‘Have you heard Robert Snoates recite his own verse to the tom-tom and the penny whistle?’”

For those wishing to make the acquaintance of Lord Peter, I recommend Whose Body?, Clouds of Witness, Unnatural Death, Strong Poison, Murder Must Advertise, The Nine Tailors, and Gaudy Night. I don’t particularly like The Five Red Herrings, Have His Carcase and The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, but that’s just my opinion.

Although Dorothy Sayers is probably best known today for her Lord Peter novels, she also wrote a number of excellent plays, most dealing with religious subject, including Zeal for Thy House, and The Man Born to Be King. This last cycle of plays caused an uproar when they were written, since Sayers had the nerve to make Christ and the disciples speak in modern English in an attempt to remove the layers of traditional religious language and emphasize the historical reality of Christ. Sayers was a devout Anglican, and many of her essays and articles deal with questions of doctrine and orthodoxy. Sayers considered Christian theology intensely interesting, and worked at getting that concept across to the average person, most of whom considered theological study to be right up there with reading an income tax form. To Sayers, “the dogma is the drama.”

Many of Dorothy Sayers’ articles and essays have been collected and published in two books: The Whimsical Christian, and Unpopular Opinions. I highly recommend both collections. They display the depth of her mind and the width of her interests. In re-reading them, I was struck by how many articles looked at the question of work, and the importance, as she saw it, of people doing work that they were fitted for, that they enjoyed, and that was of real value in the world. She was worried about unhealthy work trends she saw in the 1930’s: she’d probably shudder even more now. Work, in her mind, was intrinsically a good thing, in which humans could experience in a small way some of the joys of the creative process of God. Even among Christians today, such an idea is rare.

Finally, her essays on women, especially “Are Women Human?” are well worth reading. They are pithy, thought provoking, and full of tart commentary and common sense. For example, Sayers disliked it when others solicited “the women’s point of view” on many issues, as though one individual woman’s thoughts were somehow those of all women. No one, she noted, ever took the opinion of an individual man as somehow expressing “the man’s point of view” – it was merely that man’s opinion on the subject.

That’s just to whet your appetite. Now go and read Sayers for yourself. Peanut butter crackers and Earl Grey tea are optional.

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Julia Whitfield lives near Lancaster, PA and is busy creating bookshelves out of wooden crates to house her overflow book collection, which includes many by Dorothy Sayers. She doesn’t eat peanut butter crackers much anymore, but still has a tea chest full of Earl Grey.